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With his six-year-old
son enrolled in Californian state school, Andrew Gumbel finds its roots
in a conformist education systemill at
ease with dissent or critical thought.

08 September 2003

Sooner or later, anyone
who lives abroad reaches a defining moment when the desire to understand
and fit into the foreign culture hits a brick wall of absolute resistance.
In my case, living in California, it came a few weeks ago at my son's
elementary school open house. The first-grade classroom was transformed
into a showcase of art projects, spelling bees and mini-science workshops
on the life cycle of insects. So far, so good. But then the children
of Room 63 started to sing, and my internal refusal mechanism went haywire.
In unison, they launched into "America I Love You":

It's your land, it's
my land,
A great do or die land,
And that's just why I sing:
America, I love you!
From all sorts of places,
They welcomed all the races
To settle on their shore.
They didn't care which one,
The poor or the rich one,
They still had room for more.
To give them protection
By popular election,
A set of laws they chose.
They're your laws and my laws,
For your cause and my cause.
That's why this country rose.

Granted, I'm not a big
fan of patriotic sentiment in any context. But this got my goat in ways
I just couldn't shake. First, there was the niggly matter of historical
accuracy. (What are black, Asian or Native
Americans supposed to make of that line about welcoming all the races?)

One also had to question
the dubious taste of singing about a "do or die land" in the
wake of a controversial war in Iraq that many parents in our liberal
corner of Santa Monica had passionately opposed.
What really riled me, though, was that the song had absolutely nothing
to do with education. The words were lousy, and the music wasn't a lot
better. It bore no relation to the rest of the classwork on display.
So what was it doing there? I might have understood better if my son's
teacher were some raving flag-waving patriot, but she isn't. She, and
the other parents, beamed proudly and generally acted as if the song
were a normal part of the American school experience.

Which, as I quickly discovered,
it is. Patriotic songs are sung up and down classrooms at Grant Elementary,
just as they are at every other school in the land. Mostly, they go
without challenge or critical examination. In third grade, for example,
the daughter of a friend of mine merrily sang her way through "It's
a Grand Old Flag", which includes the lines: "Every heart
beats true/'neath the Red, White and Blue, /Where there's never a boast
or brag ..." Her father, an old Sixties radical who doesn't like
to keep quiet about these things, gently asked her when they got home
whether the whole song wasn't in fact a boast and a brag. His daughter
went very quiet as she thought through the implications of his question.
Challenging received wisdom in this way is
something she never encounters in the classroom.

Even after five years
in the United States, I continue to be surprised by the omnipresence
of patriotic conformism. This phenomenon long predates 11 September.
When my son started playing baseball this year, he and his friends were
made to recite the Little League pledge which begins: "I trust
in God. I love my country and respect its laws." What
has that got to do with sportsmanship? When, a few weeks
later, he and I went to see our first ball game at Dodger Stadium, I
was flabbergasted all over again when the crowd rose to sing the national
anthem. This was just a routine game, not an international fixture.
So what was with all the flag-waving?

With my son's education
at stake, I can't help but ponder the link between what is fed to children
as young as six and what American adults end
up understanding about the wider world. There is much that
is admirable in the unique brand of idealism that drives American society,
with its unshakable belief in the constitutional principles of freedom
and limitless opportunity. Too often, though,
the idealism becomes a smokescreen concealing the uglier realities
of the United States and the way it throws its economic, political and
military weight around the globe. Children are recruited from the very
start of their school careers to believe in Team America, whose oft-repeated
mantra is: we're the good guys, we always strive to do the right thing,
we live in the greatest country in the world. No
other point of view, no other cultural mindset, is ever seriously contemplated.
Schoolroom maps of North America detail city names, roads and rivers
within the continental United States, but invariably leave the areas
within Canada and Mexico blank, as though reality
itself stopped at the national border.

People love to beat up on Americans for their ignorance of the wider
world, and there is no lack of evidence to back them up. Every now and
again, a gob-smacking poll will reveal that most of the population can't
place the Middle East on the map, or think that Africa is part of Asia,
or some similar nonsense. Ignorance is not, of course, an exclusively
American vice, but there is something goofily compelling about its expression
in so deeply insular a country as the United States. I spent the period
between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany
reporting for an international news agency; nine months into the year-long
assignment, I learned that most U.S. newspaper
readers had no notion that East and West Germany had ever been divided.

In the recent build-up
to the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans
had no problem accepting two fallacious contentions put forward by the
Bush administration: that Iraq had a hand in 11 September, and that
Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qa'ida. Many lefty
anti-war protesters saw this as evidence of a sinister manipulation
by the White House, a glaring instance of the Big Lie theory of propaganda:
that if governments - aided and abetted by a pliant, uncritical media
- say something often enough and loud enough, people will believe it.

But I heard an even more
pessimistic explanation from Hussein Ibish of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination
Committee. Americans, he said, have been so ground down by decades of
negative imagery from films and television depicting Middle Easterners
as religious extremists and terrorists that they
are simply unable to make distinctions. In their eyes, Saddam
Hussein is Osama bin Laden. All Palestinians are suicide bombers. The
demonisation was the same when the Vietnamese were tarred as "gooks"
a generation ago; in America, there is nothing
difficult about peddling stereotypical distortions of the enemy of the
moment.

The United States is
far from a monolith, though, and it has no lack of bright, inquisitive,
well-read, well-travelled people who know their Slovakia from their
Slovenia, who care deeply about the United States' image around the
world and like to think they help improve it. Even this super-educated
group, however, is not immune to the Team America ethic. If U.S. voters
largely fell in line over the Iraq war - despite widespread disquiet
at the lack of UN support, despite alarm at the new doctrine of pre-emptive
warfare, despite suspicions that the administration
was exaggerating or fabricating claims about Saddam's weapons programmes
- it was in part because too many people with the knowledge and intelligence
to ask tough questions chose to roll over, drop their criticisms, ignore
the evidence before their eyes and cheer on the home team.

Two examples. On 19 March,
the day the war with Iraq began, two experts in child psychology appeared
on a highly regarded radio show in southern California to talk about
the best way parents should explain world events to their impressionable
offspring. Betsy Brown Braun, a child development specialist, acknowledged
the difficulty of justifying the morality of warfare to children forever
being told to resolve their differences without resorting to violence.
But her solution was simply to defer to the official line. Parents,
she said, should explain that "we tried
to talk to people in Iraq", but that this is "a
dangerous situation that has to be stopped". "Think
what you will about President Bush," she went on, "it is our
job to let our children know that President Bush's number one concern
is that everyone who lives in this United States is safe, that
we're not trying to hurt anybody, that we want to keep all
the people in the world safe."

The other guest on the
show, clinical psychologist Richard Sherman, concurred. "We all
need to be united," he said. "I think it's important that
children in the families are supportive of what is going on. It
avoids confusion for the child and additional worry and nightmares
and so forth if everyone is working as a team." Was this sound
professional advice, or grandstanding for the White House? Astonishingly,
when challenged by irate listeners in the call-in segment of the programme,
both experts expressed their personal opposition to the war and agreed,
contrary to the message they were urging parents to give children, that
non-military options had not in fact been exhausted.In other words, they thought it better
to lie and pretend everything was dandy rather than entertain the possibility
that the U.S. government was making bad choices for its citizens and the
world.

Example number two cropped
up in The New Yorker, in a review of post-11 September literature by
the well-regarded author and historian Louis Menand. Among the geopolitical
interpretations he considered was Noam Chomsky's - as ignored by mainstream
U.S. opinion as it is revered on university campuses at home and abroad
- in which U.S. foreign policy is seen not as a force for global democratisation
but as a blunt instrument of neo-imperialist
conquest and corporate expansionism. It was possible, Menand
allowed, that "Chomsky's interpretation will be the standard one
among historians a hundred years from now". But then his argument
took on an almost surreal twist. Chomsky's views, he said, were "a
good reason never to worry about what future historians will think of
us: they'll despise us no matter what. It's what we think of us that
we need to be concerned about." I had to read that last sentence
twice to be sure I had understood it right. But there it was:
it's better to live in collective self-delusion, in Menand's view, than
to face up to reality. Or, as Kurt Vonnegut slyly pointed
out in Breakfast of Champions, written in the midst of the neo-imperialist
folly in Vietnam: "It was as though the country were saying to
its citizens, 'In nonsense is strength'."

The nonsense is instilled from an early age, by a school system that
both reflects and reinforces the United States' societal desire to see
itself in terms of what it should or could be, not in terms of what
it is. Subjects constituting knowledge of the
wider world - history, geography, economics, comparative
religion, and so on - are clumped together
and termed "social studies", an area of education with a distinct
and rather peculiar cultural connotation. Which is to say
it is a bit of a joke, an easy option for school sports coaches who
need some back-up skill to carry out their classroom duties. In elementary
and middle school, there is no requirement for specialist qualifications;
history and geography are taught by general class teachers, so it is
pure luck whether students actually learn something or just doze their
way through the assigned textbooks. In high school there are dedicated
history and geography teachers, some of whom do indeed give off sparks
of genuine passion and commitment. Too often, though, social studies
are used as a dumping ground. Students end up either with the basketball
coach or else with some spare administrator kicked into the classroom
to fill a bureaucratic hole. No wonder high
school seniors consistently score worse in history than in any other
subject.

The curriculum itself
displays a similar lack of seriousness. In California, for example,
no history or geography is introduced until the fourth grade (that is,
age 9), and there is no exposure to the contemporary
world outside the United States until high school. Even in
the upper grades, most students will focus on 20th century U.S. history,
economics and U.S. government institutions. So
it is entirely possible to graduate from the school system,
perhaps even excel academically, while barely
knowing that the rest of the world exists.

The problem is not only
with what is taught, but also how. In a hair-raising recent book called
The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn,
a seasoned education specialist and sometime presidential adviser called
Diane Ravitch chronicles how the censorial impulses of both the right
and left conspire to bleed the content, and
the life, out of school textbooks. Because the U.S. textbook
market is dominated by just four companies - Pearson, Vivendi, Reed
Elsevier and McGraw Hill - and because they are terrified of having
their titles dropped over some tiny unnoticed tidbit that some buyer
somewhere deems to be offensive, the whole
educational system is effectively hijacked by fundamentalist Christians
at one end of the spectrum, and by politically correct left-liberals
at the other. It might seem impossible to keep both of these
happy at the same time, but that is exactly what the various "bias
review" committees of the publishing houses set out to do, with
crazy consequences. Out go references to
dinosaurs (which might be considered an implicit recognition of Darwinian
evolutionary theory); out go descriptions of extramarital sexual attraction,
nudity, drinking, gambling, smoking and all mention of God, Satan or
the occult; out go descriptions of black people who are petty criminals
or on food stamps, or of Asian Americans who work hard (all of which
would pander to racial stereotype); out go depictions of old people
who are frail, or women who stay home to raise their children (gender
stereotyping); out goes any suggestion that physical disability could
be a noticeable hindrance of any kind.

As Ravitch argues, the
right is interested in censoring topics, while the left wants to control
language and images. For both, the intention
is to try to engineer social behaviour by creating a hermetic
bubble around the learning environment. The right believes that avoiding
descriptions of bad behaviour on the page will lead to more moral behaviour
in real life; the left believes that describing an ideal society without
prejudice or poverty will help bring it about. Either
way, the purpose of education is betrayed because children are simply
denied access to reality. And the students don't buy it; they are simply
bored to tears.

Nowhere is the conflict-free approach more absurd than in the teaching
of history. Since religion is a hot potato that nobody wants to confront
head on, the great religious wars of the past are explained away as
though they were about something else entirely. Thus, the Crusades come
off primarily as a European grab for the jewellery and spices of Asia.
Modern notions of acceptable language and behaviour are, more generally,
allowed to intrude into the retelling of the past in absurd ways, as
Ravitch discovered when she served on a committee compiling standardised
test exams. One passage they considered, about class differences in
ancient Egypt, was expunged on the grounds that any discussion of class
difference, past or present, was "elitist". Another,
about a School for Negro Girls in early 20th century Florida, was rejected
because the word "negro", although perfectly acceptable in
the context, is no longer considered PC. In fact all but
the most recent texts are usually considered unacceptable because, as
the president of one publishing company told Ravitch: "Everything
written before 1970 was either gender biased or racially biased."
If the system does not like the
historical record, it has no hesitation in simply rewriting it.

The manipulation of education
is more subtle and, arguably, more insidious
than it was 50 years ago at the height of the Cold War and
the great Red Scare. Then, the battle for hearts and minds was about
the straightforward exclusion of certain books and topics in pursuit
of a political agenda. Groups like the Minute Women lobbied ceaselessly
against communism, socialism, socialised medicine and racial integration,
arguing that schoolchildren were being brainwashed into believing in
them.

These days, the issue
is no longer banning books, even if that still goes on in parts of the
heartland dominated by the Christian right, but rather systemic conformism.
It used to be that an inspiring teacher could overcome the shortcomings
of bland textbooks and blinkered administrative madness. But with the
curriculum now much more closely defined and homogenised, textbooks
designed for an ever wider audience and standardised testing on the
increase, teachers are finding their leeway severely restricted. To
a great degree, they have to teach to the test. And, since the test
takes the form of multiple-choice questions, not essays, they
are effectively forced into complicity with the textbook pretence that
every historical struggle has now been settled and can be summarised
in a few soothing lines of near-meaningless analytical blancmange.

None of this is cheery
news to people in the education business. "The
system we have is not one of enlightenment, but one of indoctrination,"
I was told by Daniel O'Connor, a specialist in the politics of education
and chair of the department of liberal studies at the Long Beach campus
of California State University. "Development
of inquisitive minds is not what they are after. Where is the room for
inquisitiveness on the part of the student when what is required is
to get the answer right? Inquisitiveness is about questions, not answers."
It is not just the school system which conspires to dampen the students'
curiosity about the wider world, O'Connor suggested. Parents, especially
middle-class parents, are increasingly concerned
about shielding their offspring from what they see as pernicious or
disturbing influences at school - anything from drugs on
the playground to uncomfortable concepts being bandied around the classroom.

Just sending children
off to school in the first place is a traumatic decision in a society
where the pressure, increasingly, is to hold
them back as long as possible to spare them any unnecessary stress.
Parents are much more involved in the classroom than they used to be
- partly the result of cuts in education, partly
the result of the trend toward over-protectiveness - and
so keep an eye on teachers to ensure they do nothing untoward or upsetting
to their loved ones. In conservative parts of the country,
this can lead to teachers being sued for saying anything too outspoken
about politics or Darwinian evolution, or for assigning novels whose
content is deemed to be unpatriotic, socially subversive or obscene.
Even in liberal towns like Santa Monica, the constant surveillance has
its effect. The emphasis in education is no longer on training children
to be adults; it is, as O'Connor put
it, about keeping students in a "child-like" state of blessed
ignorance.

To find out how much
a typical high school graduate actually knew, I talked to Charles Noble,
the head of Cal State Long Beach's political science department who
has been teaching first-year classes for years. Clearly, we are not
talking Harvard or Stanford here. But these are still students enrolled
at a four-year college course, putting them in the top 30 per cent of
Californian school-leavers. One might also think taking political science
classes would indicate an inherent interest. If the interest is there,
however, it is pushed far into the shadows by blank fear. "They
are so intimidated by political discourse, they feel certain they don't
understand anything," Noble said. "If you ask them
for an opinion, most of the time they won't tell you what they think.
Even if they do, they almost apologise for
having a view. On the rare occasion that a student is actually
passionate, the others in class will roll their
eyes."

Students, Noble said,
complain that politics is too hard to understand, to which he retorts
that if they can master the intricacies of baseball they shouldn't have
too much trouble with the rules of elections, law-making and executive
office. "I spend a lot of time convincing them that it is comprehensible,"
he said. "They sometimes look at us as
if our role as teachers was to make them feel bad. Usually,
at the start of the year, I just put it on the table and say, 'You don't
know anything about this subject and you think I'm going to spend 15
weeks making you feel foolish about your ignorance.'" That usually
gets their attention, at which point he can begin to explain how something
as ordinary as membership of the Automobile Association affects political
decisions - on road construction, vehicle tax rates and so on.

College is traditionally
the time of life when Americans get politicised. Among my well-educated,
well-travelled, liberal-minded neighbours in Santa Monica, many have
described the scales falling from their eyes as they came to understand,
after years of listening to pap about freedom and apple pie, how American
power really operated in the world. That politicisation is still alive
and well on more prestigious campuses where both the pro-Bush right
and the dissenting left have been re-energised in the wake of 11 September.
The evidence of Cal State Long Beach, however, suggests that further
down, in the state universities and community colleges, young people
are growing more apolitical. Noble said that a few years ago there were
usually one or two environmental activists in his classes; these days,
the only signs of political life come from religious anti-abortion advocates.
The essential problem, in Noble's view, is
a society that has lost touch with its own system of government.
"How do you talk politically," he asks, "in a country
that has no political culture?"

In the immediate aftermath
of 11 September, many Americans were seized by a thirst to know what
was behind the destruction at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
"Here we are under devastating attack," said a participant
at a teach-in I attended, one of dozens that sprang up in California
alone in the first few weeks, "and we
have no idea who did this thing and why." College professors
and other experts eagerly came forward to initiate discussion on everything
from U.S. policy in the Middle East and Afghanistan to the wellsprings
of the very ignorance that had caught the country so badly by surprise.

As time went by, however, the desire for understanding gave way to a
more visceral craving for reassurance. Tell us the world won't blow
up tomorrow, people thought as anthrax-laced letters hit the eastern
seaboard and the now-ubiquitous phrase "weapons of mass destruction"
entered the popular lexicon. Tell us U.S. power is still worth something.
Tell us our way of life is not going to come to an end. On
such insecurities did the Bush administration build its War on Terror,
with its imagery of good versus evil, its with-us-or-against-us attitude,
and its insistence that U.S. military might, not the old international
consensus, should be the centrepiece of a new world order.

The President said 11
September happened because people who resented U.S. freedoms wanted
to prevent their spread around the world. And an unnerved
country was inclined to believe him, because he cast America as a lone,
heroic colossus whose sacrifices could be borne with forebearance, even
joy. How much more reassuring than the possibility that the
United States had in fact betrayed its own democratic principles by
doing business with tyrants and monsters, and withheld from whole populations
the very freedoms and elemental notions of justice it prized so much
at home.

Soon, all the worst,
self-deluding impulses of Team America kicked in. The
mainstream media gave the White House the benefit of the doubt on just
about everything, even as the administration instituted a wave of secret
arrests and closed court hearings, reserved the right to remove whole
categories of suspects from the civilian justice system, jacked up the
military budget without establishing an adequate fund for domestic security,
tore up international treaties and pushed for a whole new generation
of nuclear weapons. Nobody seemed to want to believe
that these things were happening, or if they were that they were really
as grave as they sounded.

And the same soothing
message, the same drip-feed of political Prozac, found its way quickly
into the education system. Trust the President and everything will be
okay. Educators sent notes home to parents on how to deal with the aftermath
of 11 September, but not on how to explain why it had happened. Rather,
they recommended close parental supervision of television newscasts
to make sure nobody got upset. Educational books appeared, purporting
to tell schoolchildren what they need to know about 11 September.But mostly they were filled with meaningless
platitudes about Americans being united by patriotism and
the firm belief that terrorism is a Bad Thing.

The
ignorance and self-delusion have been compounded by the deep-seated
anti-intellectualism of the current President. Intellectuals
have never exactly been popular in U.S. politics, but George W Bush, a
C student and proud of it, is in a category of his own when it comes
to disregarding or even openly campaigning against objective reality.
Manipulating intelligence reports on Iraq isn't much of a stretch for
an administration that ignores scientific research on global warming,
or insists on a link between abortion and breast cancer, even though
no such link has been found. The Christian fundamentalist agenda is
so strong that Aids researchers at the National Institutes of Health
are now afraid of using words like "homosexual", "gay"
or "anal sex" in their work. As one scientist advised his
colleagues in an e-mail quoted by The New York Times: "Assume you
are living in Stalinist Russia when communicating with the United States
government."

Ignorance, self-delusion,
free-floating disregard for the facts and an unswerving belief in its
own infallibility: such are the hallmarks of today's America.

People don't understand
what their government is up to
because they don't understand how government works and because the media
isn't giving them any clues.

Those responsible for
the country's education prefer to avoid giving offence than to impart
any actual information. The disconnect between
the people and the rulers they elect, and between the rulers and those
most directly affected by the consequences of their actions, is little
short of frightening. A glimpse into history suggests empires
often build up these illusory images of themselves, images that through
their deceptive power eventually conspire to bring them down. It happened
to the Romans, and to the Japanese, and to the Soviet empire. Could
the United States be so very different?*

(In
accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving
the included information for research and educational purposes.)

______________________________________________

THE
FOUNDATION, INSPIRATION, EMPATHY AND SPIRIT
WITH WHICH TVOTW WAS CONCEIVED AND BUILT UPON
RESIDES WITH THE FOLLOWING EVERLASTING PRINCIPLE

- "LOVE CONQUERS ALL THINGS" -

______________________________________________

"IF
YOU WANT OTHERS TO BE HAPPY, PRACTICE COMPASSION. IF YOU WANT TO BE
HAPPY, PRACTICE COMPASSION."

- DALAI LAMA -

______________________________________________

"YOU
NEVER KNOW WHAT THE OUTCOME IS - BUT THE TRUTH IS ALWAYS THE BEST PLACE
TO START"

- JULIAN ASSANGE -

______________________________________________

-
FAMOUS QUOTE -

"Human
beings are the only creatures on earth that claim a God - and the only
living thing that behaves like it hasn't got one."